    1. Our digital universe is growing rapidly. For example, 1.8 zettabytes (1021) of information was created and replicated in 2011, and that amount is doubling every two years See 1. “Extracting Value from Chaos” (IDC, Framingham, Mass. 2011); world wide web site emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-extracting-value-from-chaos-ar.pdf. Archival data storage is often in the form of hard drives, optical media, and magnetic tapes, which offer recommended lifetimes of 5-30 years See 2. J. Rothenberg, Scientific American 272, 42-47 (1995). As digital information continues to accumulate, higher density and longer-term storage solutions are necessary. DNA has many potential advantages as a medium for information storage See 3. C. Bancroft, T. Bowler, B. Bloom, C. T. Clelland, Science 293, 1763-1765 (2001). The first instance of encoding general digital information into DNA was 35 bits in 1988 See 7. J. Davis, Art Journal 55, 70-74 (1996). Recent work deals with compression and encryption of data into DNA (usually limited to uppercase letters), and its viability in living cells See 3,8, and 9. C. Bancroft, T. Bowler, B. Bloom, C. T. Clelland, Science 293, 1763-1765 (2001), C. Gustafsson, Nature 458, 703 (2009), and D. G. Gibson et al., Science 329, 52-56 (2010).